With schools’ fall semester starting soon, a debate has been ignited over the reopening of schools. Generally, Democrats (being more open to stay-at-home lockdowns and other such measures) are against reopening schools for in-person, on-campus classes, while Republicans (generally against pandemic prevention measures), especially the president and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, is very much in favor of reopening schools. However, reopening schools, especially before the virus is contained, and particularly in hard-hit urban areas, is a terrible idea. Here’s why.
Many public school districts—especially those in the hard-hit south—are stuck between a rock and a hard place with regards to reopening this fall. On one hand, continued and prolonged online distance learning impacts low-income families and minorities more. However, reopening could potentially allow teachers and students to get sick and spread disease. As many students still lack an internet connection, online learning unfortunately leaves many students behind.
In addition, like just about any aspect of this pandemic, it has been seriously politicized. With Republicans (especially President Trump) refusing to admit previous failures in handling the pandemic, they want schools to open to build up the image that “COVID-19 is not serious at all.” Democrats, obviously, are quite against the notion of reopening, and that we shouldn’t make teachers and students suffer before a vaccine is readily available or the pandemic is contained. These views were also reflected in each party’s coronavirus relief bills.
Putting partisan politics aside, though, there are very real reasons why reopening is not a good idea, especially when a pandemic is raging across the United States. Firstly, studies have shown that people between the ages of 10 and 19 spread the disease at a similar rate compared to adults. This means that middle and high school students can and will spread the disease quickly. In addition, a student at a Greensville, Indiana high school was found to have contracted the virus on the same day that schools reopened there, forcing it to shutter quickly. And in Gwinnett County, Georgia, 260 school employees were found to have tested positive for COVID-19.
And if the argument can even be made that children are less at risk of contracting the virus compared to adults, teachers aren’t. Even if we assumed that children have a zero percent contraction and death rate of COVID-19 (they obviously don’t), we would still be sending thousands of teachers like lambs to the slaughter—teachers, being fully grown adults, are at a high risk of contracting the disease, especially since they will be meeting lots of people throughout a school day. Thus, many teachers in high-risk states are staging protests against school reopening.
Plus, the disease is most often spread when people congregate in groups, when people touch a surface contaminated with the virus, or via spit droplets. If we can’t even trust college students and adults to follow these prevention measures, can we seriously expect five or six-year-olds to? It is natural for children to congregate with friends and touch different surfaces, thereby accelerating the spread of the virus. Also, considering how hard it has been convincing mature 40-year-old adults to wear a mask, it would be quite difficult to force young children to wear a mask, too. To prove this point, here’s a picture of a school that just reopened in Paulding County, Georgia.
In addition, even if children show less severe symptoms of COVID-19 than adults, there is every risk of children spreading the virus to their families back home or to other people they meet, again accelerating the transmission of the virus.
Obviously, continued online learning is not sustainable. It is definitely less effective than in-person learning, opens the door to lots more cheating, and severely impacts low-income and minority families more. Considering how many parents have lost their jobs amid the pandemic, it is reasonable to assume that many won’t be able to afford to keep the internet going. One solution to this problem is via assistance provided to students in need via school districts: districts could assign WiFi eggs or hotspots to students who need it, or park school buses with internet capabilities in low-income neighborhoods. Schools can also assign students with cheap tablets so students won’t be forced to use a cell phone or go to a library. None of these would cost too much money in the grand scheme of pandemic fighting.
That is not to say that all schools need to, and should, remain closed for the fall semester, though. For example, a school in rural Montana in a small town with a low number of cases would definitely be much easier to reopen than one in say, downtown Houston or Phoenix. Besides, that school in rural Montana is likely to serve more low-income families unable to afford an internet connection than the one in downtown Houston, so as long as strict preventive measures are taken, there is less of a problem in opening that school.
And obviously, there is a much higher case to be made for high schools reopening before elementary schools and preschools, since it would be easier to enforce pandemic prevention measures in a high school rather than in an elementary school, for instance.
One last point I would like to leave behind is this. If politicians (and other people) are really saying the reason to reopen schools is to help low-income families, why are the exact same people rallying against increased welfare and safety nets, and better healthcare for everyone, and extended unemployment benefits, which would actually help low-income families?
In most cases, therefore, it simply doesn’t make sense to reopen schools, considering the number of new cases and deaths it will bring. Reopening of schools, at least in densely populated urban cores, cannot happen until the pandemic and the virus is fully contained or a vaccine is made available.